John Stuart Mill on political correctness
Our merely social intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but
induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for
their diffusion.
In a Biv society they become Iv-B, a hidden prejudice that chaotically changes many situation.
With us, heretical opinions do not perceptibly gain, or
even lose, ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out
far and wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking
and studious persons among whom they
originate, without ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with
either a true or a deceptive light.
Sometimes they can flare up but then hit a ceiling as they become too visible as V-Bi, I-O police can also become involved. usually it oscillates between this ceiling and a floor of minimum prejudice.
And thus is kept up a state of
things very satisfactory to some minds, because, without the unpleasant
process of fining or imprisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing
opinions outwardly undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict
the exercise of reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of
thought.
Many Iv-B and Oy-R parts of sosciety are hidden like this, like B being driven underground as roots and Iv branches hidden behind V leaves. Because Iv-B and oy-R are chaotic they can represent logical thinking of cause and effect to give these opinions, often though they run up against the random thinking of V-Bi and Y-Ro. For example someone decides a race is inferior, then they are confronted with random genetic mixes of that race clearly superior to them. The two attitudes then are that a race might grow in roots and branches indicated one is superior, the other is that random mixes of genes can create superior people in any race.
A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world,
and keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already.
But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the
sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind. A state of
things in which a large portion of the most active and inquiring
intellects find it advisable to keep the general principles and grounds
of their convictions within their own breasts, and attempt, in what
they address to the public, to fit as much as they can of their own
conclusions to premises which they have internally renounced, cannot
send forth the open, fearless characters, and logical, consistent
intellects who once adorned the thinking world.
In the I-O marketplace of ideas there comes a balance between V-Bi political correctness often championed by Bi and Iv prejudice, often seen in the media as left versus right and policed by hate crime and libel laws.
The sort of men who can
be looked for under it, are either mere conformers to commonplace, or
time-servers for truth, whose arguments on all great subjects are meant
for their hearers, and are not those which have convinced themselves.
Those who avoid this alternative, do so by narrowing their thoughts and
interest to things which can be spoken of without venturing within the
region of principles, that is, to small practical matters, which would
come right of themselves, if but the minds of mankind were strengthened
and enlarged, and which will never be made effectually right until
then: while that which would strengthen and enlarge men’s minds, free
and daring speculation on the highest subjects, is abandoned.
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